Into the Blizzard by Michael Winter Read Free Book Online Page A

was a modern world I was walking through. This was what England had become one hundred years after the First World War. The American writer Nicholson Baker said that if there’s only one thing a reader takes away from his work, he hopes it’s that a person can think a lot of things. I agree: regular people think everything. And a hundred years ago they thought everything. I am naive, you’ll say, and misunderstand the experience of war, or the necessity of it. I am not wise to how a society is coerced into war. Baker’s approach? What I like about
Human Smoke,
his book on the Second World War, is the absence of narrative bias, a voice. And yet the selection of materialbecomes Baker’s voice. The scenes he chooses to illuminate offer an opinion on the war. He ends the book with the one sentence he alone wrote: “By the end of 1942, the majority of the people who were killed in the war were still alive.”
    Inside one of the closed stores—it was “to let”—I spotted a poster of a sculpted sheep. The sheep used to hang from the second storey. The sheep had been there during the war, so I stood back and imagined it still hanging above me. I overlaid the image of the sheep upon the stone face of the shop. The head of the sheep had fallen and smashed on the ground right there at my feet. So they had built a new one. The sheep was from a company in the early 1900s that sold, on consignment, woollen goods from women in the area. I was reminded of the gas station near our summer house in Newfoundland that sold woollen trigger mitts. The cashier placed the money in an envelope under the cash drawer for the woman down the road who knitted the mitts. I imagined the money and the envelope, making its trip down the road to the woman, and a rifle, held by warm hands, in the woods trained upon an animal. It made me happy, being at the junction of this entire enterprise.
    Two Americans were skipping rope outside the youth hostel. They followed this by doing pushups against two rings in the pavement. America had not entered the war until 1917, and their comic books reflected this. I watched the collapse and press as the two Americans pushed theearth away, then came so close to it again with their strong noses that they breathed upon the world. It was true that many, and especially the Americans themselves, felt they breathed the joy of life into both wars. The American writer James Salter says it’sessential for a writer to travel. “It’s not a question of meeting or seeing new faces particularly, or hearing new stories, but of looking at life in a different way. It’s the curtain coming up on another act.”
    So says the ex-military man Salter, who flew fighter jets in Korea.
    The hostel had a kitchen and I ordered the fish dinner, but I was late and twenty German tourists had just eaten all the fish. A part of me hated the Germans for this act and wished they had been forever banned from the soil of Britain. I ate potato-leek soup and sat with the Germans and ordered a pint, and twenty minutes on the internet for one pound. The waitress poured the flat Guinness from a tin into a pint glass and then placed the glass on a ledge and punched a button. Slowly a head formed—the result of a magnet of some kind on the ledge.
    I used the code on the slip of paper my pound had bought me to access the internet on the public computer. A Toronto friend was in Paris.
You’re probably in a war zone,
he wrote. I wasn’t yet, and I explained that I could only visit him in Paris if the Germans had been there in 1915.
You are venturing,
he replied,
into the heart of war.
That’s my friend’sflat, laconic tone: sincere with praise, yet mixed with a spoonful of derision. The Newfoundland men, too, while training here in Salisbury, had been full of humour and light-heartedness alongside grievance at the hard training and resentment that their familiarity was being beaten out of them in order to instill the discipline required to turn men